“You don’t have discussion in a cemetery. You have reflection, and you have memories, and this (monument) brings up memories that are not so pleasant in our history,” said Council Vice President Sheri Carter.

These are Americans who died as prisoners of war. “They die off like rotten sheep,” said a Union soldier who worked at the camp, where conditions were bad. The “monument” is a tombstone large enough to feature the names of each of the dead. This is not a statue of a Confederate war hero. It is simply a grave marker noting the names of POWs who died far from home.

There is no longer equality before God of the fallen, not in Madison, Wisconsin. The city council spits on these dead men, who passed away not in combat, but in Union custody.

In Grace Church cemetery in my Louisiana hometown, you can visit the grave of Lt. Commander John Hart, US Navy, who captained a Union gunboat that was shelling the town and that very church in 1863 [a local friend just informed me that Hart’s boat was blockading the town to prevent contraband from coming and going; the Union gunboat that shelled the town came in 1864]. Cmdr Hart committed suicide on the boat during the battle. He was a Freemason, as many of the Confederates were. Hart’s men asked for a truce, and for the right to bury their commander in the Grace Church cemetery with full Masonic honors. The Confederate Masons agreed. So the war stopped while all the combatants gathered around the grave to commit Cmdr Hart to the earth.

Children in my hometown are often taken to Hart’s grave and told the story. His grave is treated with great respect locally, and always has been. That’s what decent people do for the dead. There is a brotherhood that defies mortal conflicts.

The leaders of Madison, Wisconsin, are manifestly not decent people. God preserve us Southerners from behaving so shamefully. I suppose it won’t be long before they disinter the Confederate bodies and put them on a barge down the Mississippi.

It’s hard to imagine what kind of despicable people destroy a tombstone — a tombstone! — for political reasons. This is a sign of the times — and of a time to come.

UPDATE: Here’s the text from a 1990s-era story from the Baton Rouge Advocate, written by George Morris, telling about the local woman who rescued that cemetery from ruin. Notice that the people of Madison did their best to take care of the interned POWs, and that when Mrs. Waterman died, one of her pallbearers was a former Wisconsin governor and wounded Union veteran. This is the noble history of Union supporters and veterans that the current Madison City Council defecates on:

Alice Whiting Waterman, born in Baton Rouge in 1820, is buried in the Confederate Rest section of Madison’s Forest Hill Cemetery. That is a rare honor for any non-soldier, much less a woman. But Waterman earned the right by pouring the last 30 years of her life into caring for the fallen warriors interred there.

That the cemetery exists at all is a matter of historical accident. In the spring of 1862, Southern soldiers were defending Island No. 10 in the Mississippi River a few miles south of New Madrid, Mo. They had been stationed there to prevent Union warships ,reinforcements and supplies from getting to Gen. Ulysses Grant, who was fighting farther to the south in Tennessee. When Union troops captured New Madrid on March 14, the soldiers on Island No. 10 found themselves surrounded. The Mississippi River was high, forcing many of the defenders to fight in knee- and waist-deep water. Badly outnumbered, they finally surrendered on April 8, 1862. More than 1,000 were captured and shipped north.

Under normal circumstances, they would have gone to Camp Douglas in Chicago or the Rock Island, Ill., prison camp. The Battle of Shiloh, however, had ended a day before their surrender, and the Union suddenly had more Confederate prisoners than it knew what to do with. So, many were taken to Camp Randall, a Union training base in Madison. From their ordeal on the island and the cold train ride north, pneumonia and other diseases ravaged the Confederates.

“Word spread like wildfire through the city of Madison that they were going to get these Confederate soldiers, so everybody got to the railroad station,” said Jim Zeirke of Sussex, Wis. Zeirke is historian for the Alice Whiting Waterman Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The long stream of sick and wounded soldiers touched the crowd, Zeirke said. “Some woman just cried out in the crowd, ‘My God, that could be my son,’ ” Zeirke said. “Something about that electrified the community, and the next thing you know they’re bringing milk, cheese, meat, all sorts of food products, all sorts of medicines, blankets, clothing, everything for these prisoners. The Wisconsin Union soldiers training at Camp Randall are starting to get kind of irritated because they’ve never had this kind of attention.”

For many, the kindness was too little too late. By the end of May, 114 prisoners died. Before the prisoners were moved to Camp Douglas in July, the death toll reached 140. The town quickly forgot those left behind. Waterman discovered this when she came to Madison in 1868. The cemetery was badly overgrown and the wooden headboards rotting.

“Nobody in the North thought they should take care of it. It was their enemies, and why take care of it?” said Jim Heberling of Madison, who has researched the cemetery’s history. “Then she saw it. She felt it was part of her heritage, and she took care of it.”

A childless widow who worked in rooming houses to make a living, Waterman’s sacrifice was considerable. She bought new wood headboards. She weeded the cemetery and planted trees, hedges and flowers. Accounts differ as to whether she accepted any financial help for the work, but most agree that the bulk of it came from her pocketbook.

“I’ve seen some indication in some other history of her that she was a very modest woman, judged by the fact that we don’t have a lot of terrific background on her,” Zeirke said. “I’m not aware that she was ever profiled. I’ve looked through some old newspapers. I’ve never done an extensive search. I wish they had Nexis and Lexis for the 1880s.”

“She said about the men buried there, ‘They are mine. I belong to them and they to me. They are my boys,’ ” Heberling said.

When Waterman died on Sept. 13, 1897, her work had become famous in Madison. Former Wisconsin Gov. Lucius Fairchild, a Union veteran who had been wounded in the war, was one of her pallbearers in a funeral attended by many prominent residents. An obituary in the Wisconsin State Journal lauded her life’s work, which others would continue. Permanent headstones have replaced the wooden ones, and a brass plaque now explains the history and Waterman’s contributions. Part of Forest Hill Cemetery, this section is called Confederate Rest. Zeirke and Heberling believe it is the nation’s northernmost Confederate cemetery.

“Mrs. Waterman, being of Southern birth, took a very tender and touching interest in the plot occupied by 100 or more Confederate dead,” her obituary said. “She beautified the spot, encircled it with shade trees … and for these soldiers lying so far among strangers she unceasingly performed the most sweet and charitable labor of love. At her own request and on the exact spot long since designated by her, she will be laid to rest with her ‘boys,’ as she so fondly called them.”

Meanwhile, those howling about the horrendous treatment of POWs in Camp Randall May want to actually read up on this terrible, terrible place. Without fences. Where local women brought fresh hot food daily and nursed the prisoners by hand, brought reading materials, and most importantly, warm clothing.

We are pathologically friendly, but Wisconsin is still really dang cold half the year. Which is part of why we are so friendly: you stick together or freeze alone. (The other part is the beer and cheese.)

There’s not a day that I don’t ask myself (as someone with Spanish blood) “which side of the Spanish Civil War would I have fought on?” and there has never been a day when the answer did not come back that I would have unequivocally and without remorse fought for Franco for the preservation of Spanish Catholic Civilization.

It should be noted that in the Finnish Civil War, which was concurrent to the Russian Civil War and had White and Red sides, and which the Whites won, had most Red victims (of which there were many – the Whites engaged in systematic slaughter after the war) buried in unmarked, unblessed graves without markers and with commemoration being forbidden. (Eventually there were markers and commemorations, after time had passed.) That would seem to be rather more relevant to what would have been the result of a White victory in the Russian war than the Spanish situation, no?

When you say “Madison, Wisconsin”, a whole host of potential evils spring to mind. Given that desecrating anything to do with these poor men is all the rage with leftist vandals these days, Madtown must have felt a bit behind the curve. “Hey, as elected officials in a liberal college town, we’d need to know if there’s any Confederate s*** around here that we can wreck and p*** on and generally use for virtue signalling to the SJWs so they don’t turn against us and fire-bomb city hall. Just a cemetery marker? S***. We wanted to knock down an equestrian statue or something. I guess it’ll have to do. Say, maybe you can tell us: who were these ‘Confederate’ guys anyway? I mean, other than embodiments of human evil all trace of whom must be systematically effaced from the surface of the earth?”

Military grave desecration in certain areas of the United States appears to be an issue contemplated by the Pentagon. I was contacted recently by a genealogist regarding a highly decorated ancestor buried in a Catholic cemetery. The Pentagon is considering relocating his grave to a national cemetery where proper security can be provided on an ongoing basis. The genealogist was tasked with locating next of kin for permission.

“Progressives believe that there are no values that transcend politics.”

Thus everything gets politicized, even cemeteries. They can’t even let the dead rest in peace. Why do we think they’ll leave the living alone? Stuff like this is exactly why this independent conservative will be voting straight GOP next month, associated stench notwithstanding. If I have to choose between a hungry, greedy wolf and a crazy rabid one, sorry, but I’m going with the former.

“Madison is a university town, if I’m not mistaken, so I’m not too surprised by this behavior. Far from being educated, or even “enlightened”, these people are philistines.”

Yes, but that’s what we as a country wanted so there are no surprises here. College degrees for all! After the Second World War there was a concerted effort (as reflected in such as the GI Bill) to make college degrees available to “the grazing multitude” (in the immortal words of George Washington). And this was all in the name of democracy and (my favorite line from Jefferson’s Declaration) the “Pursuit of Happiness”. The results? Well, they play themselves out on a daily basis, with superficially educated people storming the barriers. And happy they ain’t.

““It’s interesting that countries all over Europe are able to show proper respect to the war dead of former enemies; namely WW2 German soldiers.”
They might feel different if a group of apologists for the Third Reich wanted to erect a monument to the cause those soldiers fought for.
[NFR: That’s not what happened in that Confederate cemetery in Madison. — RD]”

The “truthful history” that the UDC promotes is that preserving slavery was not an underlying cause of the war. Anything they touch is contaminated by that belief.
The graves and headstones remain untouched. No desecration has occurred.

Ad the risk of derailing this conversation, I would like to hear more from “JEinCA” on why they would have supported a undemocratic, Fascist, mass murdering military dictator like Francisco Franco. For the cause of “Catholicism” no less! Both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supported Franco, so you’re in great company there.

Somewhere around 400,000 Spaniards perished in Franco’s work – I’m sorry, concentration – camps. Please, enlighten me as to why you would have supported this.

[NFR: He can answer for himself, but the choice facing Spaniards back then were between two extremisms. There was no third choice. The Republicans, allied with Stalin, were massacring priests and nuns. What other choice did Catholics have? It was a terrible tragedy for Spain on all sides. — RD]

(Canada may be a lefty paradise sometimes (and far too much so for traditional Christians), but North Vietnam or the Third Reich, she ain’t…)

It’s my lefty paradise as much as yours.

Laura Secord’s walk led to the deaths of 25 American soldiers and the capture of 500 more. Because of her the Americans lost a significant battle they should have won easily. All this within 100 miles of the US border.

Tecumseh, fought the American government for almost his entire life. His Native Confederacy fought to secede from the US prior to 1812 and fought with Brock at the Siege of Detroit.

As far as I can tell they were worse than Rommel and Minh, in that they sought the destruction of the USA directly and came close to succeeding.

It’s my experience that flowers are generally placed on the side of the gravestone on which the deceased’s name and dates are carved. Looking at this photo, I can’t see such information on any of the stones, except the centrally located large marker. I know it’s not a great photo and blowing it up blurs it fairly quickly, but can someone who actually is familiar with the site confirm whether the individual stones identify those resting under them or whether the large marker is the only one with the names of the dead?

There’s not a day that I don’t ask myself (as someone with Spanish blood) “which side of the Spanish Civil War would I have fought on?” and there has never been a day when the answer did not come back that I would have unequivocally and without remorse fought for Franco for the preservation of Spanish Catholic Civilization.

Ditto.

Maybe we should just dig these dead Confederates up and p*ss on them. That’s what the left wants to do anyway – proving its own “morality.”

@Philip in TN
You must not know any progressives… I happen to know many (including myself) and all of us have values that transcend politics. We live them everyday. We read them in Holy Scripture and do our best to follow those higher principles. I suppose there’s a few of our brethren who fit your caricature, but I could find people on your side who fit that same bill (“no values that transcend politics”) It’s this kind of untruth that breeds our partisan rot. Please get out and get to know other people and help heal this country’s divides.

If the descendants of Union soldiers wished to triumph over those they conquered, it would at least be understandable, albeit disappointing to those who take Lincoln’s rhetoric seriously.

If the descendants of those who were slaves in the pre-1865 USA wished to exact revenge on those who wronged them, that would also be understandable, albeit disappointing to those who take MLK’s rhetoric seriously.

But what incomprehensible malice motivates people whose ancestors arrived in the USA after 1865, such as Paul Soglin?

Haha, Among the Jonquils
said what I was going for, but much better. I think he’s exactly right, a bunch of clowns trying to gain sjw street cred

I live about an hour from Madison, and I know all about it’s liberalness, but it’s a great city, and I hear a nice place to live. We enjoy the weekly city market around the capital, and the free zoo. Also, many friends and relatives have benefited in health crises from UW medical specialists, some of the best in the world

So I’m not going to let this unfortunate decision color what I think of Madison. I hope they replace it with a stone with all the names (especially if the original ones can’t be read anymore), just removing the DoC parts. Genealogists like markers like that; it takes more work to get the record of who’s buried where when there aren’t legible markers

These stories about Franco’s family being dug up, though. Wow! I hope that’s just a rumor. How wicked.

Everywhere and all over the world, people on the losing side of wars, civil and otherwise, have been buried anonymously, often in mass graves. One could pick out a thousand examples of such.
In the United States, one must ask how many anonymous and violent deaths of black slaves and Native Americans, not to mention immigrant workers, who built the foundations of our nation, were placed in unmarked graves. We do not even know today where children separated from their parents are, or what inhumane conditions in which they live.
Picking out this example of some folks in the state of Wisconsin is an example of disingenuous political rabble rousing in which the exception is used to prove the rule of one side of our political spectrum’s assertion that the other are manifestly not decent people.
And what of those then who flaunt the systemic enslavement and forced migration to a foreign land whereon the whole economy of a half the nation was built? One graveyard does not equal several hundred years of oppression.

Mont D Law, if those Americans had stayed on their side of the border, they would not have died. It’s a toss up which war was the least justifiable in our history, but the War of 1812 is certainly in the running.

A note on Benedict Arnold: He deserves a prominent place in the Saratoga battlefield, where he played an important role on the side of American independence. I would not put up a statue to him in Virginia, where he led British forces in raids later in the war.

The Republicans, allied with Stalin, were massacring priests and nuns.

That’s the sort of cynical political propaganda that Rod swallows all too easily. La Pasionaria was running around Madrid finding a crucifix for a grateful mother superior while Franco was making these grandiose claims of massacre. For the most part it was anarchists, not communists, who were burning churches and killing priests, perhaps even a few nuns. Anarchists had a strong traditional presence in Spain, and unfortunately were part of the Republican coalition. Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, was a big fan of the anarchists.

They might feel different if a group of apologists for the Third Reich wanted to erect a monument to the cause those soldiers fought for.
[NFR: That’s not what happened in that Confederate cemetery in Madison. — RD]”

You’re wrong. That is EXACTLY what happened in Madison. The confederate soldiers already had neat gravestones. The large monument that is now being removed was a Daughters of the Confederacy propaganda exercise.

It will be a federal crime to remove or deface the headstone.

No headstones are being removed.

How is this any different from a tombstone?

Calm down. Hysteria does not become you. One difference is that the bodies are buried under the headstones, not the cenotaph. Another is that there ARE headstones, and the cenotaph is not one of them. Its not rocket science.

Stalin is most popular political figure in modern Russia, despite well documented mass murders under his directives, dubbed ‘an effective manager’.

During the Brezhnev years, working stiffs used to invoke the name of Stalin against the nomenklatura. Like cab drivers displaying photos of Stalin in their vehicles as a protest against the government. Go figure.

As for another Civil War, what songs will be written about Facebook flame wars and the keyboard commandos?

During the whole protracted “debate” about Confederate monuments, I have tried to distinguish between an honor (say, a statue currently standing in a town square) and a historical remembrance (a plaque or sign signifying an event or noteworthy site). We get to choose what we honor, and are not bound to follow the opinions of those who came before us. But we don’t get to make the past disappear simply because we don’t like it.

Cemeteries can blur the line between these two categories, but this case seems to fall squarely on the “remembrance” side of things. Besides acknowledging the immutable humanity of Confederate soldiers, the city counsel would be wiser to remember the past, than to destroy it.

“You guys can be real drama queens sometimes.
Actually, pretty frequently.”
Sometimes the Left display just how limitless their kookiness is – and a person can’t help but have a chuckle.
Leftists accusing normal people of being “drama queens” – It’s like a man who bathes all day long in a vat of raw sewage pointing to the ketchup stain on your sleeve and berating your standards of hygiene.
(The psychological term for this mental malfunction is “projection”?)

They might feel different if a group of apologists for the Third Reich wanted to erect a monument to the cause those soldiers fought for.

[NFR: That’s not what happened in that Confederate cemetery in Madison. — RD]

Wait, what? How is it not like that? Please explain your understanding of how, why and by whom that monument from 1906 was erected. I still don’t think that taking down the monument is the right move. I think adding an informational kiosk for context makes sense, and that an appropriate expression of concern would be to add a monument to unknown dead slaves (sort of like an equivalent of a tomb of the unknown soldier). But BobS’s comparison is apt.

As an aside, I think that there are a few major critiques that can be laid at the door of the current left. The two that bother me most are the refusal to understand class, and the issue germaine to this example, the impulse to right injustices by tearing down rather than building up. Sometimes tearing down is right (abolishing slavery being a head-smackingly obvious example), but most of the time it is both more effective and more right to build up and ignore or brand the folks in the wrong.

Of course the impulse isn’t only limited to the left. On the right, people often react to their resentment of others by wanting to take away from them. There is the resentment, for example, of teachers and other public employees who, despite modest pay, do have great benefits. I think that people in the private sector are in one sense right to resent the perks that public employees get, but they express them wrong. Don’t demand that benefits be taken away from teachers and public employees; demand that private sector working standards improve! Sorry, way off subject here, but that’s one that’s really bothered me for decades, and I hate seeing the left starting to follow that same pattern.

Siarlys, we DO have the 101st Fighting Keyboards. Now. Who started that nonsense…

Tom Lehrer is still alive, but I imagine he finds it impossible to top reality. Which is too bad. The Proliferation Lullaby is one of my all time favorites.

Rod, you don’t live here. You have made repeated errors in this story. You don’t know the local climate, which is very different from both what you seem to think and from what many people on here claim due to “what friends have told them”. We take pride here in how these men were cared for and how they were buried well.

The Daughters of the Confederacy were an evil organization. They raised funds to support lynchings, false propaganda, and actively advocated for the Klan. Their chunk of marble isn’t a tombstone. It’s an altar to a set of brutal lies. We don’t want it.

The graves remain. The names remain. A number of monuments to the camp exist. Heck, the Stadium is still called Camp Randall. We have one of the nation’s foremost Veteran’s Museums, a Veteran’s hospital that’s one of the finest around, and several training facilities still in use.

But sure. We have no decency for taking down a Klan memorial.

[NFR: The fact that the cenotaph says that it was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy does not make it a “Klan memorial.” Come on! — RD]

Ummm… I realize that your tongue may have been firmly in cheek, but still…

This (mostly annoying) triumphalist song is not a traditional Canadian folk song as the YouTube entry suggests. As far as I can make out, it was written by two members of the Tanglefoot Band in the 1980s or 1990s. There’s always a solid market for smug anti-American moral superiority amongst Canadians.

Laura Secord did not live in Canada – there was no Canada until 1867, more than half a century after Secord’s famous walk from Queenston to Thorold in the British colony of Upper Canada. This is not a technical quibble, Secord was not Canadian, there were no Canadians in her time, she was British. As late as 1891, Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, famously declared “a British subject I was born and a British subject I will die.” And, truth be told, who didn’t want to claim membership in the world’s most powerful Empire if you lived next door to a territorially expanding USA (think Mexico here)?

Benedict Arnold did move to the British colony of New Brunswick between 1785 and 1791 but he was a hugely unpopular figure there. Following of a series of “bad business deals and petty lawsuits,” he was burned in effigy in front of his house by the residents of St. John. (Wikipedia) Maybe the burned remnants of this effigy is the monument to BA you’re thinking of?

After the War of 1812-14, there was a kind of balance of mutual assured destruction between British North America and the United States that underwrote the subsequent peace between them. A determined American army could have marched north and captured everything worth having in the British colonies but the British navy could respond by burning all the populous US eastern seaboard cities to the ground. Up to the late 19th century, the burning and sacking of Washington was celebrated with a school holiday in the Upper Canadian colony.

It’s my experience that flowers are generally placed on the side of the gravestone on which the deceased’s name and dates are carved. Looking at this photo, I can’t see such information on any of the stones, except the centrally located large marker. I know it’s not a great photo and blowing it up blurs it fairly quickly, but can someone who actually is familiar with the site confirm whether the individual stones identify those resting under them or whether the large marker is the only one with the names of the dead?

My understanding, from what’s available online, is that the tombstones did have on them the names of the dead, but that those names have become (no doubt to various extents) eroded over time. That makes sense, as the names on the tombstones were almost certainly the only possible source for the names on the monument erected 50 years later by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

It also appears that the removal of the monument requires the approval of the state Historical Preservation Office.

A fascist dictatorship is not about preserving anything than it’s own hold to power. You are infected by the SJW-virus, from the right instead of the left, speaking as an American in favor of a cruel and destructive old style European dictator.

[NFR: What choice did Spaniards of the era have? They were caught between two deadly extremisms. Ever read Orwell’s “Homage To Catalonia”? — RD]

[NFR: What choice did Spaniards of the era have? They were caught between two deadly extremisms. Ever read Orwell’s “Homage To Catalonia”? — RD]

I admit I have a typical European post-war Pavlov reaction to anything related with fascism and do not have a good answer to your question. I also have not read Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”, but I will. Regards.

“[NFR: The fact that the cenotaph says that it was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy does not make it a “Klan memorial.” Come on! — RD]”

As others have pointed out, it’s not a cenotaph.
While the Daughters of the Confederacy were not the KKK, they promoted a distorted version of history that contributed to the rebirth of the Klan in 1915. That the Daughters of the Confederacy shared many principles with the KKK in the early 20th century is not a debatable point. The assertion that graves/headstones are being destroyed/desecrated is not only debatable, it’s a lie.

“The Republicans, allied with Stalin, were massacring priests and nuns.

That’s the sort of cynical political propaganda that Rod swallows all too easily. La Pasionaria was running around Madrid finding a crucifix for a grateful mother superior while Franco was making these grandiose claims of massacre. For the most part it was anarchists, not communists, who were burning churches and killing priests, perhaps even a few nuns. Anarchists had a strong traditional presence in Spain, and unfortunately were part of the Republican coalition. Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, was a big fan of the anarchists.”

Cynical political propaganda?

The Republic’s anti-Catholicism was evident from its establishment in 1931. Republican sympathizers burned many churches and convents down beginning that very year. In response to an early such incident, Prime Minister Manuel Azaña refused to take action against the arsonists, saying, “All the convents in Madrid are not worth the life of even one Republican.”

The Republican government dissolved the Jesuits in 1932, nationalized most church property in 1933, and banned the teaching of religion in schools. The Red Terror began in 1934, during that year’s failed Socialist uprising against a democratically-elected center-right government. In connection with that uprising, 58 churches were torched and 37 religious were murdered.

After the Popular Front came to power in the wake of fraudulent elections in February 1936, even more churches were burned and leftists routinely extralegally seized property that did not belong to them.

Note well that this was all before the start of the Civil War. The Red Terror during the Civil War proper is estimated to have caused the deaths of between 38,000 and 173,000 lives. Paul Preston, among the most viscerally anti-Francoist historians, estimates the number of deaths at around 50,000. By what measure is this not a massacre?

Your suggestion that all of this is somehow outweighed by one isolated act of kindness by La Pasionaria is laughable. That act of kindness merely shows either that La Pasionaria was a shrewd political actor or that, like Darth Vader, she “still had some good in her,” or some combination of both. Let’s not forget that before the Civil War, La Pasionaria made death threats against right-wing members of Parliament José María Gil Robles and José Calvo Sotelo. To Gil Robles, she screamed, “You deserve to die!” After Calvo Sotelo made a speech, she shouted, “You just gave your last speech!” A few days later, Calvo Sotelo was murdered by Socialist police officers. Those same cops also paid a visit to Gil Robles that same night, but luckily he wasn’t home. Within days of the murder of Calvo Sotelo, Franco — who had long been reluctant to participate in the military conspiracy against the Republic — crossed the Rubicon and rebelled.

You’re correct that the Communists were quite moderate compared to their anarchist, Socialist, and even bourgeois Republican allies. That speaks to the shrewdness and sophistication of their long-term political strategy, but does not change the fact that, like their allies, they were committed to the abolition of Catholicism, the foundation of Spanish culture.

To be sure, I can certainly understand why you, good Communist that you are, hate Franco so much.

After all, he defeated your side in the Civil War. Later, he defeated a Soviet- and American-led effort to isolate his regime and provoke a massive famine that would, the superpowers calculated, lead Spaniards to overthrow him. Still later, he defeated your boys yet again, by defeating the maquis. Worst of all, he turned out to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century. He kept Spain out of World War II, arguably saved more Jews from the Holocaust than any other world leader, overcame (as stated above) countless efforts to destroy him, transformed Spain from a third-world nation in 1939 into the tenth largest (and second fastest-growing) economy in the world in 1975, and, on his deathbed, asked forgiveness of anyone and everyone whom he had hurt and forgave all those who declared themselves his enemies, without his having regarded them as such.

It must really hurt to know that this good and great man not only repeatedly thwarted Communist ambitions, but accomplished such extraordinary feats for his nation.

[NFR: The fact that the cenotaph says that it was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy does not make it a “Klan memorial.” Come on! — RD]

Oh, but I am a dog to his own spit. As Siarlys has stated, at the time the memorial went up, it’s purpose was close to exactly that. It may not be true now, but it was then. Your use of the word “Klan memorial” suggests a very ahistorical view of what the Klan was to the South in those times.

Look, I’m sorry, but if there is ever any true equality in this country, yes, some Confederate stuff is getting taken down, because the people who live near such things will have their rightful power, and they will do what any white Southerner would do were they in the other’s place. That is what happens when people have liberty to democratically govern thier own affairs.

As I have been forced to state too many people over the past two years, including, but not limited to, lots of WHITE WHITE WHITE conservatives such as yourself, wanting something to be untrue Does. Not. Make. It. So.

And I say this as someone who would vote to leave the damn thing alone.